Play Windows Games on Linux


A friend asked me to get a Windows game working.

She gave me her laptop which had a copy of Windows XP (SP2 I think)

She said it wont run Sims 3

I checked and it was because the game requires a Pixel Shader 2.0 capable graphic card.
So it was because it was a low spec machine.

I had a spare laptop (Dell Precision M70) which had a nVidia card which was PS 3.0 capable.

Now all my machines have various versions of Linux, so that would mean repartitioning and installing WinXP which I would prefer not to do.

The machine had Ubuntu Jaunity, but I had VirtualBox and an installed copy on WinXP, and VirtualBox supports 3D acceleration so I started an install.

While this was underway, I thought I'd see about running it on Linux, so a quick Google and it turns out it apparently can.

So my task is to see which runs better:

I found some instructions here and so installed PlayOnLinux while it was installing in WinXP in the VM.


Ah!

This means that it looks like WinXP in VirtualBox is a no-go

Haven't tried this yet


Installing onto Linux now (deliberately showing KDE3 window menu so you know :-)

See how this goes...


This is as far as I got...

There were some more error dialogs after I clicked "yes", but I was up against it with time
But I haven't given up yet.

WinXP on VB isn't fairing much better:


I need to do a native install to see if it isn't a bad copy on Sim 3

So I installed WinXP and the appropriate drivers including Video driver and it plays the game OK.
This is on the same machine, I just popped a different HDD into it.

I will need to give this more time and a bit of debugging...